William Harris, 56, a post systems analyst at Cleveland’s Palmer-Inge, was dismissed this week when it was discovered he had done absolutely nothing since being hired 13 years ago – despite always typing frantically at his computer for an average of 12 hours a day.
The situation came to light when he punched the wrong key and accidentally sent one day’s worth of typing to the entire company via email. The document contained one sentence – “A man with a zebra played the xylophone in Quincy” – typed 6,934 times.
A check of his digital history – from the office and from the 18 months he worked from home – revealed he’d done the same thing every day since his hiring, for a total of 16,593,443 identical sentences typed.
“He claimed that nobody gave him assignments and after awhile he quit asking,” says a company source. “But he needed the job, didn’t want anyone to find out he had nothing to do, and decided to type gibberish.”
For a long time, it appeared to work. Harris was almost universally perceived as a hard-worker and rising star – coming in early, skipping lunch, and rarely using the restroom as he typed away. He’d received the monthly Go-Getter award six \times, and in 2009 was invited to sit directly behind CEO Cleo Parkman at her annual What’s Happenin’! presentation.
“He worked so hard that a lot of people would tell him to go easier on himself,” says the source. “He’d just shake his head and say he had too much to do.
To prevent such an occurrence from happening again, Palmer-Inge has installed the new Mortonsen IV (bg9) software, which automatically detects identical sentences that are typed more than 10,000 times.
